The Jack-Booted Thug of the Week...

... is Erie, Pennsylvania Police Department Internal Affairs Inspector James DeDionisio, for "leaning" (to be more polite than the investigator deserves) on the brother of a vacationing Australian man who happened to take a cell-phone video of off-duty Erie police officer James Cousins II apparently doing some drunk-bragging in a bar about some cases he worked, including mocking the mother of a homicide victim:




Pretty low-class and boorish, but we've seen much worse. After all, how much is really true, and how much is booze-soaked puffery? Officer Cousins is free to talk about whatever he wants while off-duty, so long as secret or personal information isn't revealed. Embarrassing, but certainly nothing that broke any laws.

The real crime, in our opinion, occurred once the Erie PD found out about the existence of the video on the Internet. The brother of the photographer (who has since returned to Australia) claims (and a coworker confirms) that he was visited at his work site by Internal Affairs investigator DeDionisio (along with Cousins, who was in full uniform and driving a marked cruiser. No try at a little intimidation there, no sirree.), who proceeded to threaten the man with Federal wiretapping charges if he didn't find a rapid way to get his brother to take down the video from YouTube:

"The man who was questioned Tuesday said DeDionisio told him police had consulted with the Erie County District Attorney's Office about pursuing a federal wiretapping case against the source of the video."

Except, of course, that the district attorney vehemently denies being consulted, and emphatically states that he wouldn't even consider filing any such charges, considering Cousins was spouting off in a public place, and thus had no reasonable expectation of privacy:

"District Attorney Brad Foulk, who has decried Cousins' behavior on the video, said he never advised police on the case and would never agree to such a probe.

'That is absolutely preposterous. I would never consider charging this person with a wiretap violation,' Foulk said Thursday."

The Erie police chief, Steve Franklin, doesn't exactly have clean hands here either, so he comes in second in this week's JBTotW voting. His office apparently contacted YouTube directly to attempt to get the video pulled down from the site, which the company properly refused to do, since the owner of the video had not made such a request and the video does not portray illegal or immoral acts.

If that action wasn't bad enough, Franklin also dispatched one of his bobos to ask Foulk to get a court order to get the video taken down, a request that the DA also rightly immediately shot down.

All of this seems to boil down to Chief Franklin and Inspector DeDionisio not having the slightest clue about how internal investigations are supposed to work, since they seem much more interested in finding out who actually shot the video and getting them to please, please take it down by any means necessary than they are in "investigating" Cousins' statements on the tape:

"Franklin said finding out why the video was shot is important to the investigation into Cousins' behavior." (Emphasis mine)

I can answer that, Chief. Your officer was making an idiot out of himself in front of a tourist, who decided to record the moment out of a sense of disbelief and outrage. Perfectly legal, and it might be a valuable lesson to your other officers about keeping a semblance of professional decorum while not on the job.

"'I needed to determine if that person was the person who posted it,' DeDionisio said Thursday. 'We would like to have it removed from the site even if we were doing the investigation because it was done without his knowledge.'"

So freakin' what? We're recorded without our knowledge in public places multiple times a day, and so are millions of other peasants. We don't have officially dispatched attack dogs to go shake down the recorders if we're caught making an ass out of ourselves, though, and Officer Cousins shouldn't have that option, either. We also like to have banana split sundaes delivered to our door every night at ten p.m. sharp, but we don't get that either, Inspector DeDionisio. Somehow we've learned to live with it.

Here's the laugh-out-loud funniest line in the whole story:

"'It leaves a lot of questions unanswered why you'd film someone apparently intoxicated in a bar, and not only film it but send it to YouTube for posting,' he said. 'It's out of the ordinary to go up and film someone and send it to YouTube, of all places.'"

Chief Franklin has obviously never even been to YouTube, since seemingly most of the videos there comprise just that sort of subject matter.

Officer Cousins has been suspended with pay for the duration of the "investigation", although the case can certainly be made that out of the three men, he has done the least to be disciplined about, unlike DeDionisio and Franklin, who have blatantly abused their police powers to attempt to cover up Cousins' embarrassing rant, and while doing so have instead made the situation many, many times worse for themselves and their department.

After all, it's never the crime, but the official coverup that usually sinks an administration. You'd think that government administrators would have learned that lesson by now.